Author: Eliza Kern

I won’t ask you if you missed the Super Bowl last night. But did you miss Twitter? Good luck re-living that today.

With every major event we now experience as a country, whether it’s the Super Bowl or the presidential inauguration, it becomes more evident that the conversation on social media is as tied to the event as is the process of physically tuning into the broadcast. There’s nothing new about this — the rise of social media and the second screen has been clear for years — but as soaring numbers for social media sharing are revealed after each event, we shake our heads at just how quickly things have changed.

Even within a year, the connection between television events and their small screen counterparts has grown at a remarkable rate (13.7 million Super Bowl-related tweets in 2012 versus 24.1 million last night, and from 100 million active Twitter users in September 2011 to 200 million in December 2012).

That growth is changing how we view and consume media and how advertisers work to reach us. Suddenly, they can fairly reliably cross-promote between television and online, and consumers are increasingly sucked into experiencing both events in real time. And I say events, because watching Twitter during an event like the Super Bowl is an experience in itself.

One predicted trend that hasn’t come into existence yet is the merging of the television and social experiences into one, as Om once predicted and brought to my attention this morning. People are still pretty much watching television on televisions and tweeting from phones or laptops. As we wrote this morning, the majority of Super Bowl viewers did so through traditional broadcast methods, and tweeting from your TV still hasn’t exactly caught on.

But with every event comes the inevitable blog posts from Twitter and Facebook and Instagram about how this was the most-tweeted or the most-photographed or the most-shared event EVER. Frankly, those posts will only be newsworthy if the numbers ever decline, but that seems unlikely at this point. The dual forces of television and social media are dragging us into experiencing live events as they happen, turning on its head the idea that portable computing devices and streaming will let us watch whatever we want whenever we want. And they are setting different standards for how viewer engagement is measured: we all know the Nielsen ratings are a bit of a joke in this day and age. With Twitter’s reported acquisition of social tv analytics company Bluefin Labs, it’s something everyone is interested in figuring out.

My friend’s attempt to watch last week’s heart-wrenching Downton Abbey episode a day later was cheapened when a pivotal plot point was spoiled by a parody account for the Dowager Countess on Twitter (obviously do not click that link if you live under a rock and haven’t watched yet). It was a rough way to find out. And the experience cured my friend of wanting to DVR an episode ever again.

Because if you care about the content and you’re tied to the internet as so many of us are, saving anything for later is a losing battle. And the rapid wit of the Oreo jokes on Twitter during the Super Bowl can’t really be appreciated at a later date. Even as the Dowager Countess parody tweet ruined the episode for my friend, it probably entertained thousands of Downton fans who felt more in the know when they saw it, and felt more connected to the show as a result. There’s nothing like seeing a witty remark from someone you follow about an event you’re also following — suddenly it’s a joke you share with other people. And that experience is extremely hard to replicate after the fact.

Most of us will have to accept the fact that seperating live events from their social media counterparts is a losing battle at this point, but for brands like Oreo, the knowledge that they have a dual-platform audience creates real possibilities. And as they proved last night, can be a delicious combo, both for advertisers and witty twitter users who want in on the joke when it happens.

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Twitter appears to have acquired Bluefin Labs, a social media analytics company that attempts to understand how social media conversations and interactions take place around television. The news of Twitter’s acquisition was first reported by Business Insider. Neither Twitter nor Bluefin have responded to requests for comment.

For Twitter, working with a company like Bluefin, whose CEO JP Maheu will be speaking at PaidContent’s conference in April, makes perfect sense. As Twitter has emphasized its ability to connect users with media and especially live television events, it has still struggled, like other companies including Facebook, to figure out how to measure the scope of those social media interactions. Do you measure success by tweets per minute? Tweets mentioning a particular show? People voting for categories or outcomes on a particular show through Twitter? It’s still a question the company is figuring out, and one that Bluefin could help it answer as it works to build up monetization and partnerships in marketing and media.

An excellent profile of Bluefin Labs ran in the Boston Globe in November that explained how the Cambridge-based company attempts to analyze human speech patterns to understand social media activity:

A Cambridge start-up called Bluefin Labs is marrying the computational power of machines with the interpretive guidance of humans to make sense of — and profit from — the fire hose of nonstop social media. The company’s work builds on the research of its two cofounders, MIT guys who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching machines to understand human language. Now they are using that knowledge to teach machines to understand what we really mean when we tweet or post about everyone from President Obama to Honey Boo Boo. The outcome just may be as important to the president as it is to that cringe-worthy pint-size product of reality TV.

Bluefin Labs was founded in 2008 and has offices in both Cambridge and New York City. The company most recently raised a $12 million Series B funding round in January of 2012 led by Time Warner Investments along with SoftBank Capital and repeat investors Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

Update: AllThingsD is also reporting the acquisition, and puts the price Twitter will pay at more than $70 million.

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Can census data be fun?

At first glance, you might not think median home prices or transit data would be all that interesting. But Sitegeist, the location-based open data app from the Sunlight Foundation and famed design firm IDEO, is proving that good design can make public data cool.

The concept seems simple when you open the app, the app uses data and information pulled from a wide variety of sources. Sitegeist allows users to set their location and then flip through several screens to explore data tied to their specific location. The screens include: people (median age, age distribution, household income, gender, and political contributions), housing (median home value, average rent, percentage renting v. buying, and commuting patterns), local attractions (popular businesses, local movie theaters, and restaurants), environment (weather), and history (median home age and number of housing units.) The app is available for both iOS and Android.

The sheer volume of data that the Sitegeist app provides for each location is a reminder that between census data and public APIs from companies like Yelp, Foursquare, and Dark Sky, users can put together a relatively comprehensive profile of a geographic location. The Sunlight Foundation put together a “how we did it” blog post, explaining the technology behind the app and how they used different APIs to build a comprehensive product:

All of this wonderful data resides on our servers. When you select a location, the latitude and longitude are passed along with the ID of the pane you want to view. Of the various geographies we keep track of (census tracts, ZIP codes, etc.), the boundaries of any shape that contains your location is found. This uses a customized version of Chicago Tribune’sboundary service. We then match those geographic boundaries with any data we have, making calls to third-party APIs as needed. The collected data is rendered into templates and returned to you as the beautiful infographics you see in the app.

But presenting the information in an intuitive manner with help from IDEO was just crucial to the app’s success as the data that went into it. The Sunlight Foundation won a grant from the John and James L. Knight Foundation to hire external designers to work with them on the Sitegeist app, which was the third in a series of data apps the group worked on. The Sunlight Foundation is focused on using technology to promote openness and transparency in government, an idea we’ll be exploring at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York in March.

“These apps are designed to make the case for why open data is important to people,” said Tom Lee, director of Sunlight Labs. “And I think it’s really accessible for people. It’s visually striking, which is a credit to IDEO’s designers and Sunlight’s designers, and everyone has an investment in their neighborhood.”

I downloaded the app about two weeks ago, and I’ve found myself opening it in different neighborhoods around San Francisco to see what kinds of people live there. The app would be an ideal travel companion for exploring completely new areas, but even comparing two spots in SOMA (on the left) and Telegraph Hill (on the right), was eye-opening:

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Twitter announced late Friday afternoon that sophisticated hackers might have gained access to data associated with about 250,000 accounts on the site, and that the company believes “this attack was not the work of amateurs.” While the hacks only potentially affected a small percentage of Twitter users, the company urged everyone to change their passwords regularly and keep track of their accounts.

In a blog post Friday, the company explained what happened:

This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later. However, our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords – for approximately 250,000 users.

The company noted that there have been reports of several high-profile incidents of Chinese hackers targeting U.S. media companies this week including at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Twitter noted that it wanted to publicize the incident because it doesn’t think it was an isolated or random event, but it stopped short of identifying any likely group or country behind the attacks:

This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked. For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.

While the hackers may have gained access to 250,000 accounts, that’s still only a small percentage of regular Twitter users. Twitter announced on Dec. 18 that it had more than 200 million active users. So the hacked accounts would make up less than one percent of monthly active users.

Back in 2010, Twitter settled with the FCC after hackers found they were able to access user accounts including President Barack Obama’s account by guessing passwords and were able to send fake tweets. The company downplayed the security risk at the time, although it wasn’t the first security lapse the company faced.

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Uber and Lyft have come to agreements with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) this week, establishing ride-sharing companies in the state in another development on the bumpy road toward government acceptance. In October, the CPUC issued a cease-and-desist orders against rideshare companies like Lyft and Sidecar, which it said did not have the right permits to carry customers, but now it looks like those companies can continue in California.

While Uber is not currently offering peer-to-peer ride-sharing, the CPUC agreement allows for “drivers not specifically licensed to drive a limousine or taxi” to provide rides, which could include Uber’s drivers, the company notes. And Uber wrote that it could pave the way for ride-sharing in the future.

Update: As TechCrunch first reported and Uber later confirmed with us, the company plans to expand into ridesharing, although it has no immediate specifics to announce. “It would be natural to expect us to go into competition,” an Uber spokesman said.

Lyft’s parent company Zimride announced Wednesday that it had entered into an agreement with the state where the CPUC would drop its earlier cease-and-desist order and fine against the company. Lyft wrote in a blog post that the company has worked to improve safety measures, increasing liability insurance and performing background checks on drivers, and is pleased the state will let them continue operating for the time being:

“This agreement supports the continued legal operation of Lyft and sets a precedent for the upcoming rulemaking process. This agreement would not have been possible without the outpouring of support from the community,” wrote the company co-founders.

Uber announced Thursday that they also have reached an agreement with the CPUC over the company’s technology used to hail rides and has confirmed that its legal in California:

“This settlement agreement is part of a steady drumbeat of progress in which pro-consumer, pro-innovation jurisdictions like Washington D.C., New York City, and Massachusetts are recognizing that everyone wins when new technology that fosters efficiency, affordability, and choice in transportation is allowed to flourish. California has always been on the cutting edge. The CPUC agreement further demonstrates how the Golden State welcomes and supports not only technological advancement, but a better future for drivers, riders, and our cities.”

Rideshare and next-generation taxi companies like Uber and Lyft have struggled to gain acceptance in cities across the country even as users embrace their services, with Uber facing regulatory challenges in D.C., push-back from cab drivers in San Francisco and Chicago, and earlier problems in the more stringent New York City market. With Lyft and Sidecar, questions revolved around how the companies would properly insure drivers and riders.

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Facebook is continuing to experiment when it comes to building e-commerce and shopping into its platform, and continued the expansion Thursday with the announcement of a Facebook Gift Card. It’s a traditional plastic gift card that can be re-loaded through Facebook and stores credits for a variety of popular retailers.

Users can purchase credits to stores like Target, Sephora, or Olive Garden through Facebook, and a plastic card will be sent to their Facebook friend with the credits built into the card. It’s reusable and can hold multiple credits at once, which friends can send to each other on the site.

The move comes as Facebook has worked to build out its Facebook Gifts product this fall, which allows users to pick out physical gifts on the site like chocolates or wine and have them sent to a friend. Facebook Gifts was rolled out to all users in December and is expanding the number of gifts offered on the site.

However, Facebook did not report revenue from the Gifts program during its earnings call Wednesday and said it’s still working to make the Gifts product more widespread. Recognizing that plastic gift cards are still popular makes sense, especially since it allows brands to sell products through their pages on the site.

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Accelerator program 500 Startups plans to announce the official application opening for its spring accelerator program on Thursday. Beginning with this class of startups, the program will accept applications from companies on AngelList rather than through referrals, opening the doors wider to interested founders.

Startups interested in participating in 500 Startups can apply through the program’s AngelList page beginning January 31, 2013. Previously, companies had to get an introduction through the program’s alumni network to apply, although beginning with the most recent class they began experimenting with open applications on AngelList.

“We feel like as more people know about 500 and we try to expand more into other markets, our network is still, compared to the rest of the community, not that big,” said Christine Tsai, 500 Startups partner. The program has always had an international focus and has welcomed founders from outside the United States, so widening the application process even further makes sense. Although Tsai noted that by nature, an open process means plenty more mediocre applications, but the diversity is worth it in the long run.

“That’s just how it is,” she said. “We’re still going to rely a lot on referrals.”

The application process will stay open until March 1, although company applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis. The program’s fall accelerator batch will have its demo days in Mountain View and San Francisco next week.

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If I’m being totally honest, I’d tell you I don’t like video. Sure, I’ll settle in to watch a movie at the theater, but when it comes to short clips posted on the web? I’ll pass. I’d much prefer to scan text than watch a video, and unless your clip is a few seconds long, I’m not going to wait for it to buffer. Got a transcript? Please post.

I probably have less tolerance for video than most people, but in looking through the number of social video products in just my first six months at GigaOM and watching companies struggle for traction, I was convinced video still has hurdles to overcome before it becomes a successful social product on mobile. Which is why Vine, Twitter’s new video-sharing service that debuted last week, has me somewhat intrigued. It’s not clear that Vine is the answer to the social video problem, but it does appear that the service has solved a number of obstacles inherent to video that have traditionally kept it from mainstream success. And despite myself, I had fun putting together my first Vine.

The benchmark for that success, of course, is Instagram. The company that became the poster child for social photo-sharing proved there’s money to be made in translating a new medium to the masses on mobile; at least for the entrepreneurs. Instagram’s success hinged on simple editing that made your photos look beautiful, a fast and reliable product experience, and a strong sense of user community. But when Om asked Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom last November at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference whether Instagram would ever tackle video, Systrom outlined his reservations about the medium:

“No one wants to sit outside at a ballpark waiting for a video to load while there are 100,000 people around you wandering and you’re trying to get network signal. It’s hard enough for us to push an image down to you, I can only imagine a moving image,” he said. “[Videos] are just innately harder to produce and consume.  In order to consume a video you don’t swing past it and then you’re done. You actually have to sit and engage with it and watch it the full length — I think that’s one of the harder parts of consuming. And producing, you’re sitting there trying to frame the shot and you’re trying to get the interesting part of the video in it, but it turns out that no one wants to sit there editing a video for four minutes on their small little device. So I think what we have to do is figure out the balance of production and consumption that makes it really interesting and fast to do.”

The genius with Vine is that you can upload only six seconds of footage. Six seconds is nothing — more like an animated GIF. And Vine’s editing process is stupidly simple. Our data networks might not be much faster than they were in November when Systrom expressed doubts, but uploading or downloading six seconds of video is going to be much easier than uploading or downloading a three minute video to YouTube. And the editing process is about as simple and intuitive as you could imagine — hold your finger down to capture video, lift it up to pause recording, and keep pausing and lifting until you hit six seconds of footage. Upload, share, and you’re done. I completely understood how it worked on my first try.

People are fascinated by Vine right now, as evidenced by VinePeek, the site that loops Vine videos as they’re uploaded. It’s mesmerizing in the way Chatroulette was — it gives you a peek into other people’s lives. The concern for Twitter is that Vine will go the way of Chatroulette, and people will quickly lose interest amid a sea of naked men. Some users already have their doubts – the footage is mundane, it’s completely new territory for Twitter to take on, and naked pics are already cropping up and causing issues.

But frankly, acquiring the three-man Vine team for a non-disclosed amount seems like a relatively small investment on Twitter’s part. Because there’s potential for a huge payoff for the company that finally gets social video right.

Twitter and the Cambridge-based startup Crashlytics have announced that they’re joining forces, bringing the team that has helped other startups test their mobile versions for potential bugs and crashes into the fold at Twitter.

Crashlytics wrote on the company blog Monday about their plans for mobile app development in tandem with Twitter:

We built Crashlytics to deliver the world’s most powerful and lightest-weight crash reporting solution. With us, developers gain instant visibility into the precise line of code that caused a crash, enabling them to more easily fix issues. Since our iOS launch, we’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of incredible app developers, from those building independent passion-projects to many of the top iOS apps available today – Twitter, Vine, Yelp, Kayak, TaskRabbit, and Waze, to name just a few.

Going forward, we’re thrilled to work with the incredible team at Twitter. We share a passion for innovating on mobile and building world-class applications. Joining forces will accelerate our build-out, allowing us to leverage Twitter’s infrastructure to deliver new features faster than ever.

The Crashlytics team hails from Cambridge, and the Boston Globe profiled the company in April 2012, where the founders discussed their motivation for starting the company to help other startups understand what was causing crashes on mobile. Presumably Crashlytics will be working on Twitter’s mobile app to improve performance, which is crucial as Twitter tries to improve reliability and scales out the company going forward.

Needless to say, photo ownership is a sticky topic. Just ask all the people who left Instagram in December over Instagram’s terms of service and the question of photo ownership and rights.

So not surprisingly, one of the biggest champions of personal data ownership and paid services when it comes to social networks is forging an experiment in file storage and ownership. Dalton Caldwell plans to announced Monday that App.net will be launching a file storage API, giving each of its existing users 10 GB of file storage space connected with their accounts, so they can personally host their own photos and files and then authorize App.net apps to access those files.

App.net launched in the summer of 2012, and it’s still a little unclear exactly how Caldwell’s vision for the network is going to play out. He is currently committed to a paid network strategy where users have access to all the apps created on top of the App.net API, including everything from group texting apps to a network that looks pretty much like Twitter. Developers are paid from users subscription fees based on the popularity of the apps developers build.

Central to Caldwell’s thesis is that a paid network creates more value for the developers and gives users more ownership over their data and information. For instance, if you have an Instagram or Flickr account, you upload photos to the services which are then hosted on those companies servers even if you retain copies of the photos yourself. With App.net’s storage API, you would host your own photos in the cloud, and give authorization to different apps to access your photos (just as you give an app access to photos on your iPhone’s camera roll, for instance.)

“It’s like your personal Dropbox,” Caldwell said. “You want to maintain the originals and feel like they’re yours.” He noted that allowing for photo and file apps will be an important part of growing the App.net developer network, which is now fairly focused on text-based apps.

Caldwell said he thinks moving into photo and file storage will provide App.net developers a good deal of flexibility in what they design with the service’s API, and moves App.net into a potentially more useful and lucrative area for both users and developers.

“It’s an attempt to get away from some of the downsides of a siloed data storage,” he said.

Twitter released new data Monday on requests from governments for Twitter user information during the second half of 2012, following a July report with data from the first six months.

In Q3 and Q4 of 2012, Twitter saw increases in information requests (1009, up from 849 in Q1 and Q2) and removal notices (42, up from 6), and a slight decrease in copyright notices (3268, down from 3378).

Twitter’s two reports are now hosted on a specific site dedicated to government transparency, and the company wrote in a blog post that it would be providing “more granular details regarding information requests from the United States,” as well as adding sections to track removal requests and copyright notices.

We believe the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. To that end, it is vital for us (and other Internet services) to be transparent about government requests for user information and government requests to withhold content from the Internet; these growing inquiries can have a serious chilling effect on free expression – and real privacy implications.

Google has been providing transparency reports since 2009, and the company released its most recent set of data last week. My colleague Jeff Roberts explained the significance behind the data release and the stats Google provided, which applies to the Twitter data as well:

What this means in practice is that authorities in the United States and other countries are regularly demanding that Google hand over the keys to user accounts like Gmail or YouTube. In many cases, the government may have a legitimate reason to ask for such information, such as solving a crime or stopping a spying operation. Other times, though, governments may simply be fishing for data in a way that flouts citizens’ right to privacy. Such fishing expeditions, unfortunately, are relatively easy in the U.S. thanks to the sprawl of so-called administrative subpoenas — a legal tool that lets agencies demand data without first proving to a judge that they have a right to get it.

While Twitter has followed in Google’s footsteps in releasing surveillance data so far, Facebook has so far declined to provide the info, although it noted it’s working to promote transparency in other areas of its site. The company just launched an “Ask Our Chief Privacy Officer” feature on Monday to replace the voting system for privacy changes that it recently abolished.

Here’s the chart from Twitter showing the overview of government requests for 2012:

Third party apps are important to the Facebook phenomenon — they keep users inside Facebook’s web no matter where they are. Even beyond the addition of new data, a developer ecosystem establishes Facebook as a platform instead of a service, and provides the attractive possibility for a developer to gain traction and users quite quickly.

But recently, this relationship has hit some bumps in the road. Facebook’s value as a business rests on its social graph and its possession of your data — it’s all the company has to monetize (although monetization through Facebook Credits appears potentially successful too), and it has to protect the value of that data at all costs. The company knows that providing its social graph to developers through an API can make or break another product’s initial success, but it obviously knows it needs to dole out that access very carefully.

Other companies have struggled to define the platform/developer relationship and have had varying degrees of success. Apple tried early on to keep apps out of its App store that might compete with its products, and Twitter cracked down this summer on third-party apps duplicating its products and using its data, even if the goodwill of developers helped make Twitter what it is today. Ultimately, after the FTC began an investigation into the Apple App Store approval policies, the company had to clarify what exactly it was looking for in third-party apps, and what kind of competition it would permit. More recently, it looks like Twitter will mostly cut off access to competitive products and build its own products for the functions it wants to include on the site.

So how does Facebook plan to navigate the relationship, which has come under fire recently? Here’s how they attempted to clarify their stance today:

“Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity: Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook. (b) Replicating core functionality: You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.”

What’s confusing about Facebook is that it seemingly encourages developers to build for Facebook in areas like games, but for everyone else, Facebook is making it increasingly harder to tell which apps are okay and which count as competition. The new regulations say that you can only use Facebook data if you don’t compete with the company’s core functions; presumably games like Words with Friends or exercise apps like Nike+, which seem outside of Facebook’s focus right now. The other part to the regulations is that you must make the data created in your app easily shareable with with Facebook (a.k.a., to clutter your friends newsfeeds, generate more data, and drive traffic back to the apps). As AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac wrote, Facebook wants a return on its data investment.

But as Facebook grows larger and gets into a variety of new areas like photo-sharing (Instagram), messaging and voice (Messenger), search (Graph Search), and even disappearing photos (Poke), it’s less clear for businesses that are starting out how they can avoid Facebook, which is still undergoing rapid change in its first year as a public company. Just this month, Facebook blocked the voice-messaging app Voxer (competitive with Messenger) and social search engine Yandex (competitive with Graph Search). As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine pointed out, Snapchat probably thought it was totally cool — until Facebook built Poke in a matter of days. Dalton Caldwell said he got positive feedback from Facebook on the developer platform he built, until they rolled out their own developer platform and tried to shut his down.

At face value, it doesn’t seem like Vine competes with Facebook much, since Facebook doesn’t really have a video product (at least right now). And it’s downright easy to share Vine videos back to Facebook. But it’s clear Facebook and Twitter have a contentious relationship; so it was see ya, Vine.

While the company assured developers in a blog post Friday that most people will have nothing to worry about, building your business on top of a technology platform that you can’t control is always a risk. Sometimes it’s a risk worth taking when you need to get your product off the ground.

But when it’s not even clear what that platform is trying to be? Best of luck to you.

Shortly after Twitter launched its Vine video product on Thursday, users noticed that the “find friends” feature connected to Facebook wasn’t working, and it became obvious the two companies were at odds over Twitter’s new “Instagram for video attempt.” On Friday, Facebook came out and provided further clarification on its policy toward third-party apps, stating that it wants to grow a third-party developer ecosystem, assuming those apps share data back to Facebook and don’t compete with its core product.

Facebook wrote in a blog post Friday saying that it’s clarified its policy about third-party access:

For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you’re doing. Our goal is to provide a platform that gives people an easy way to login to your apps, create personalized and social experiences, and easily share what they’re doing in your apps with people on Facebook. This is how our platform has been used by the most popular categories of apps, such as games, music, fitness, news and general lifestyle apps.

For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today (see I.10).

Facebook’s social graph is its most valuable asset, so it’s understandable that it wants to keep potential competitors from using the data for growth. But that involves walks a tricky line in making sure it doesn’t alienate small developers who could otherwise get a jump-start through Facebook’s login system.

As Facebook and Twitter ramp up competition to gain control of our social and interest graphs and monetize them through advertising, the companies encourage us to like more brands, friend more people, and share more often. All that activity plays into our social nature as humans, sure, but the more content we contribute to those sites, the easier it is for Facebook and Twitter to make money. Yet some of the most meaningful human relationships exist between just a few (or even two) people, and as annoying as Facebook couples are, there seems to be an opportunity for social products that capitalize on our exhaustion with over-sharing and desire for private digital space.

A few apps designed for couples have cropped up in the past year, including Y Combinator-backed Pair which launched in March and the Korean startup Between, but I was especially interested in the product designed by two ex-Googlers (who happen to be married themselves) called Avocado.

Avocado (the name plays on the fact that you need two avocado trees to grow a fruit) launched in June and is taking off. Or sprouting, if you will. The company recently rolled out a premium version, and they’re finding that given the right ingredients, plenty of couples can fall in love with a couples app. In February the company raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Baseline Ventures, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Ventures, Steve Olechowski and Greg Yaitanes.

“We thought about it, and we realized the world’s most ubiquitous social relationship in the world has no dedicated social network,” said Chris Wetherell, co-founder and CEO of the company. ”I feel a little like an undertaker in the old west. Business is coming.”

The result is a simple, intuitive mobile app called Avocado that allows two people (yes, it could be you and a friend or parent if you wanted), to share lists, calendars, photos, messages, and a variety of other functions two people might use. The $19.99 premium version allows users to upload and view as many photos and shared lists as they want (regular users are limited to viewing 200 photos at a time and sharing five lists.)

The founders are themselves a pretty interesting group — Wetherell created Google Reader and implemented the retweet for Twitter, and his wife and second co-founder Jenna Bilotta most recently the lead designer on YouTube watch pages, after doing design for Reader. Third founder, CTO Rizwan Sattar was previously an engineer at AOL working on AIM.

One common question is, why would any couple who shares Google Calendars and uses SMS need the app? After all, all of the functions exist within other products on the web. But the founders explain that their users have found that having a single dedicated space for sharing notes and photos creates a sense of shared history, and they make calendar and list-sharing easy for people who aren’t necessarily Google users.

“There are list-only couples. There are calendar-only couples for sure.” Wetherell said. And one feature that’s become extremely popular is the Avocado hug, in which a user holds the phone up to their chest to record vibrations and then send the other person a “hug” that vibrates that other person’s phone. (Although they wouldn’t explain exactly how it works.)

One of the most peculiar use cases the company has seen is that they’ve heard from a variety of couples that when they begin to fight on Avocado, they move the discussion to SMS. Couples have said they don’t want their fights to contribute to the shared history they created on Avocado. Which is great for Avocado, since it seems they’ve created something people don’t want to mess up. But perhaps there’s room for a Snapchat-like fight app. Snapfight, anyone?